IN DANTE'S version of Hell, the seventh circle was reserved for those who inflict violence on themselves, on others and on God.

Jack Reacher has comfortably ticked all those boxes and a few more besides. In fact, it is entirely conceivable that Reacher, a former military policeman, has reserved a circle for his own exclusive use.

Lee Child's creation is good at violence. Built like a proverbial brick outhouse, he has the physical and mental wherewithal to both dish it out and take it and I've yet to read a Child novel where he doesn't manage to indulge liberally. And he is loved for it.

Not that love is an inaccurate or exaggerated description of it as the millions of sales the Jack Reacher series has ratcheted up (this is his 15th outing) selfevidently show there is fierce loyalty between this fictional protagonist and his fans. The question is why?

The answer is simple: Reacher is vengeance personified; a walking, fighting revenge fantasy.

For all his propensity for violence he isn't a brute

For all his propensity for violence he isn't a brute. It is never done gratuitously, even when his opponents are hopelessly outmatched.

He is essentially law-abiding, respectful of women, with the freedom to roam where he pleases and do what he chooses. What he normally chooses to do is right wrongs and defend the weak against the forces of oppression.

Those forces are the Duncan family, whose trucking business has a stranglehold of Orwellian proportions on the locals.

The novel opens with the former military policeman making his peripatetic way to Virginia via rural Nebraska after his last adventure in neighbouring South Dakota. He stops in a bar where his conscience compels him to drive an inebriated doctor to a house call because he suspects the woman seeking medical help is the victim of domestic violence.

When Reacher later seeks out the wife-battering husband to give him a taste of his own medicine, he sets off an explosive chain of events which sees him pitched against the forces of a smuggling gang while at the same time trying to solve the mystery of a young schoolgirl's disappearance more than two decades before.

Characteristically, Child drives the plot like a rally car, a hairraising ride careering down the route at break-neck speed, slip-sliding across the dirt track and imminently on the verge of losing control while never lifting his foot, jammed down hard on the accelerator.

Lee Child's loyal fans know only too well that those who enter his Reacher tales, unlike Dante's Inferno, have no reason to abandon hope. Quite the opposite and Worth Dying For, is no exception.